fried_chicken

Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall, it's strange to see it written own and be such a large number.  I remember being in High School and watching the news reports about it at the time, I remember our History teacher, Mr O'Connell scrapping the lesson he had planned for that week and just talking to us pretty much for an hour straight about what this meant.

I've been chatting to one of the guys in the office this morning about it as I knew he was based out in Germany in the Army Intelligence Corps.  I thought he shipped out after the Wall had fallen, but apparently not.  He remembers the event more vividly apparently as the weekend before was the first day he was covering the East German desk by himself on a Saturday and all hell broken loose as reports started rolling in about the East German Army starting to move.

 These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

Everything is a little up in the air at the moment emotionally, I found out last week that one of my friends - John - has terminal cancer.  He's been given 2-3 months, perhaps a little longer depending on treatment.

The real kick in the teeth is that John has been a chef for most of his life, he likes good food, but part and parcel of the chef thing seems to be heavy smoking and a fair amount of alcohol.  This type of cancer isn't tied to smoking or alcohol at all though apparently, one of the things it ties to is a bad diet.

Sometimes the universe has a sick sense of humour.

It's all a little big to take in and process, to be honest I'm not certain how much of it I do want to take onboard.  I don't want it to change the way I look at or deal with John, because if that was me, I think I'd hate that more than anything.

Kat's been really supportive of John while all this is going on, it's one of the things that makes me love her.  At times she can come across to people that don't know her well as quite self-centered, but whenever one of her friends needs help or support though she'll drop everything and try and do what she can.  It definitely puts her under the category of a 'good person' in my book, no matter how much the goth in her may try to deny it.

Seem to have been watching a fair few films recently, some brand new and others that have been around for a couple of years but I just either never got around to watching at the cinema or bought them because they looked interesting on DVD and just never had the time to actually sit down and watch them, in fact I've still got Children of Men and The Illusionist that must have been sitting on my shelf unwatched for nearly two years now.

One was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it looked really good on the trailers and Jim Carrey dispite how his career got launched seems to be exceptionally good at playing sublte characters within odd or surrel settings.  Finally got around to seeing it in the last couple of weeks and really enjoyed it.

Last night was In Bruges, a wonderfully black comedy about a pair of hitmen laying low after something goes badly wrong and a child gets killed in the cross fire, dealing with the emotional fallout from such an event.  Well worth looking at if you've not come across it before and I can't praise it enough, but equally don't want to spoil anything for people that haven't already seen it.

Went to see Inglourious Basterds at the cinema as well, it seems to have split opinions on it - as so many Tarantino films seem to do - but I really enjoyed it.  Some of the critisim is very odd though, I don't know about you lot but when I go to the cinema I'm not often looking for a film to be documentary like in it's historical accuracy, I want something that is just enjoyable, whether it's through a good script, story, acting or combination of the three.  And with that in mind I think it really delivered.

 1. What would a...

 

 

Never mind what the chair would look like, how would you know which direction you were going in?

 

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So things seem to be going well with the Blood Bowl league, even after loosing to the Dwarves on Monday the Nurgle team is still - amazingly - topping the league tables and it's been a really good laugh getting back into it again.

Kat's got a ton of ideas when it comes to painting the team so I think it's going to be a case of let her go wild and have some fun with it.

Just logged into facebook to respond to a friend request... and my default language was set to French... you'd think you'd remember doing something like that, right?! 

davedevil 's latest post HERE has brought back a lot of wonderful memories about the old Huddersfield Mage game.

Tom and I were both sharing a house at the time with Derek the ST and both playing characters that were young, idealist, somewhat messed up and at times very, very foolish.

I have so many fond memories of our two man terror campaign against the Technocracy, like infiltrating the Progenator's lab dressed pretty much as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and pretending to be Void Engineer's; coming away from it with some valuable information, a talking plant, a couple of packets of Chocolate Hobnobs and the Lab's put upon tea boy.

My favourite had to be the planned raid on a Syndicate quitessense shipment which we'd planned out pretty much as the Italian Job, and led to months of Tom and I pausing while wandering around Huddersfield, looking thoughtfully at something and then asking whoever we were with at the time "Do you think you could get a mini through there?"

One of the things I think I enjoyed the most about those old games though was Derek's storytelling, he managed to put across a very dark and sinister world and we really were the underdogs with whatever grasp we had slowly slipping away... seemingly kooky plans became a way of trying to trying to stand against it all and try and keep some hold on sanity.

I introduced Kat to Collateral earlier on this week, I'd forgotten quite how good a film it is and proves that hey, you know what Tom Cruise can actually act outside of the same old Plot Railroad that a lot of his films seem to shunt along down, that being:


Then again it's not the type of film that appeals to the usual Tom Cruise audience, which got me thinking about films that people who fall into a certain social bracket should definitely make sure they see.

Things like;
- geeks everywhere should watch Hackers
- roleplayers would be mad to miss Gattica and Fallen.
- anybody with a twisted sense of humour should see But I'm a Cheerleader.

Feel free to throw your own.

And now that I've praised Tom Cruise at the start of the post, time to balance the universal scales somewhat with some Jonathon Coulton.